Nick Shatan is a PhD candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, studying the history and political economy of affordable housing development in the United States. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Geography from the University of Chicago and a Master of City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University. Before coming to Berkeley, Nick worked for the MIT Community Innovators Lab while supporting the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative and the Bronx Community Land Trust. Originally from Manhattan, New York, Nick interned with various New York City municipal agencies on policy analysis, capital projects, and Geographical Information Systems.
This dissertation project is fueled by a simple puzzle, asked routinely about housing development and rehabilitation, today and over the last half-century: "Affordable for whom?" This dissertation breaks the answer to this question down into its constituent parts: the networks of public and private actors involved in affordable housing development, the financial, legal, and technical devices they use, and the negotiations required to make each deal work. This project aims to answer the question: How do policy and administration at the federal, state, and local levels shape networks, devices, and packaging processes, and in turn, where this housing is built and what people ultimately live there? By "affordable housing" I mean government-assisted, income-restricted, privately developed housing. The main form of income restriction is Area Median Income (AMI), a measure the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) publishes establishing income brackets of household eligibility and population targets for various housing programs. The core empirical question of this dissertation is: how are AMI and other population target rules operationalized in local agency goal-setting, underwriting and tenant selection? I chart the policy history of affordable housing eligibility and underwriting rules since the 1965 Housing and Urban Development Act against the changing norms, practices, and techniques of affordable housing actors. This will contribute to a better understanding of how policy shapes the actual building of affordable housing in the US. The empirical heart of this dissertation is the study of actors that turn governmental and financial devices into buildings where people live. These actors include HUD, the Internal Revenue Service, state and municipal housing finance authorities, tax credit syndicators, investors, underwriters, developers, attorneys, architects, lenders, elected officials, community-based organizations, and community development intermediaries. For each project, these actors reconfigure depending on the particulars of site, program, market trends and policy priorities. There remains a research gap on how this process and this field actually works. I study this field in New York City, both for its volume of affordable housing projects and actors, and my professional experience and connections there. Three major research questions guide this study. First, the network question: how do these actors relate to one another in order to get projects built? Second, the devices question: how do public-private devices shape this network, and how does the network shape those devices? Third, the package question: how do networks, devices, and policies shape deals and their material outcomes (what gets built, for whom, where)? To answer this question, I will embed myself in three key agencies for approximately four months each, for a total of one year of ethnographic fieldwork. These will be triangulated with detailed policy histories to undergird a historical-institutionalist analysis.